Everyone knows, deep down, that salads are shit, perhaps not as shit as Nandos, but definitely shit. A lot of the time people pretend they don’t feel that way, but I think in our heart of hearts we all know that no good can ever come from a salad.
I understand why people think they should eat salads, but that kind of thinking is incorrect for a number of reasons. And I shall explain why here.
It’s Just Fucking Water
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The mainstay of most salads is lettuce, cucumber and celery. Even if you jazz it up with some random fruits and vegetables it is lettuce that dominates the bowl. According to ​Washington Post ​food columnist Tamar Haspel, salad ingredients like celery, radishes, cucumbers, and eggplant are:
Pitifully low in nutrition.
And lettuces are mostly just water. All vegetables have high water content, the least of which, the sweet potato, is still 77% water, the rest of salad is 95%+ water. A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (a 1 Litre bottle is 96% water and 4% bottle) and is only marginally more nutritious.
Charles Benbrook and his colleague Donald Davis developed a nutrient quality index – a way to rate foods based on how much of 27 important nutrients they contain. Four of the five lowest-ranking vegetables (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, iceberg lettuce and celery.
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This low nutritional value means that lettuce is actually a drain on the environment. Huge swathes of land are cultivated and filled with these lumps of green water. The lumps of green water are then transported in petrol guzzling trucks across the country. So not only are salads doing fuck all for your nutrition, they are also taking up valuable crop growing space.
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